guided tour/statement
Düsseldorf, ca. 1978: I remember diagramming a bacteriophage on the blackboard from my biology teacher's description, a moment that gave me immense satisfaction. Later, I made diagrams in an attempt to read Wittgenstein's "Tractatus". I clearly failed to understand as much as I had hoped to, but the impulse to visualize text may have been established then. During my first year at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf I created sculptures and drawings that mirrored how I read Benjamin Lee Whorf's "Language, Thought, Reality." I was fascinated by this book because it introduced me to a concept of contingency: that speaking a specific language may affect how one sees the world. I continued to think about how to bring my fascination with reading into my work as an artist.
Chicago, 1988: After I graduated from the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, I briefly became a student-at-large at the University of Chicago's Committee on Visual Art. There, I mainly used the vast libraries. I continued to study the history of ideas, developed deeper interests in theories of language and communication (how to actively make sense,) in aspects of Phenomenology (being in the world) and Pragmatism (making choices in the absence of certainty.) When I prepared to teach, I organized many of my notes in diagrams, without considering it to be part of my artwork. I worked in the studio with field-like, open, felt and wood shapes on the floor, calling them "portable landscapes". These sculptures and installations were trying to grasp how a person is cognitively intertwined with the world. Figure and ground seemed to be interwoven.
When I began to project those shapes on the ground with light, it became possible to observe audience reactions to the immaterial boundaries I presented, but also to provoke activities by colleagues. I issued invitations to exhibit in the light. The light installations were fields from which concrete lines of action could emerge to reveal some of the conventions that I observed in the arts. The question of figure and ground became immaterial. Both were part of the same structure.
In 2000, I was given a semester residency at Columbia College. I set up a room with a very simple light installation as a "think tank", where I planned to work with students on their ideas, and to develop my work as well. There I gave myself license to explore diagramming further, as my interest in it had become urgent. I studied Edward Tufte's books and as a first, formal experiment I fashioned a simple map that explored the relations among areas of study.
Trying to better grasp the implications of this move to the mapping of ideas, I turned to further study about the relations of visual and literal cognition and representation. Hybrid projects ensued. For the 2001 CAA conference in Chicago I wrote a paper on "Applied Aesthetics", and also diagrammed each paragraph for the presentation. Other papers followed. For an exhibition that I devised in collaboration with Elisabeth Condon in 2001,"A Collaborative Fusion", I entirely abandoned the use of light and contributed diagrams after six books that address issues of cooperation and/or how values emerge, reflecting the theme of the show. Later, those diagrams were printed at a much larger size as well. Around that time I also assembled a digital retrospective of my own work, which helped me to clarify some of the things described here and eventually led to an exhibition that invited other artists to do the same.
Since then I have diagrammed essays and books by various authors whose ideas engage me, including Vilém Flusser (media and communication theories) and George Lakoff (cognitive linguistics, his book "Moral Politics"). There is a game about the artworld, and a project about sponsorship. For a public art commission in collaboration with Patrick McGee, I devised diagrams about solar energy, and I am now beginning to diagram institutions. I have created a large, 16' x 16' map of Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center and its interaction with its communities for the opening of the new facility in 2006. Each diagram project is situated differently, some are entirely two-dimensional, others include elements of installation and sculptural practice. I would love to sometime create a book.
All the while the classroom has continued to be a hub for developing and testing ideas, and teaching is a crucial part of my research and practice, including courses like Celebration and Festivity, Diagrams in Art and Activism, or Artist Roles in 21st Century Practice. I have also continued to organize exhibitions that inquire about foundations of art practices. My role in those exhibitions varies, I have conceived themes individually and collaboratively, been a curator, juror and a participant. My continued inclination is to approach my investigations not as an academic striving for an objective point of view, but as a biased participant in the enterprise trying to achieve something more akin to a temporary bird's eye view.